And here’s one of my later games on it after familiarising myself.

Prismriver Cinema can now be found at http://prismrivercinema.com/.

I came into troubles recently with encoding, the previous qualities were great but there were times that the encode failed due to low memory. This whole thing is run off a VPS after all! However, my host has been very kind and not scolded me for constantly using the burst RAM. If I haven’t already advertised them, you really do want to check out FanaticalVPS if you ever need a VPS. They allow pretty much everything legal, free additional IPs, real unlimited bandwidth and even gameserver traffic!

So anyway, I’ve been taking a look at ffmpeg’s command-line switches, and there are a lot of them. I was too caught up in keeping memory low that I sacrificed quality and the video I uploaded yesterday looked awful. Obviously if I’m going to use quality as an argument as to why I don’t just upload to YouTube, I’ll have to sort that out. On the other hand, I can’t use too much memory.

Here’s a small quality test I conducted to compare the quality of the different encoding options.

The new current values are similar to the ones from the post where I talked about encoding. Click the image below for full-size.

While it bumps up the file size for this 1:30 video, it definitely keeps the quality looking good. There is always the HD option too.

Memory also stays low while encoding this but it has increased the render times by a fair amount. No problem though, we’re not going to be handling 100s of videos a minute like YouTube does. Yet, haha. Anyway, that’s all good now. I thought I’d post about the domain but then I thought that was a bit too bland and included this nice diagram and development blog graphic.

The new encoding settings are live on Prismriver Cinema, if you have an account (all 3 of you) you can upload a video and check it out.

Peace, yo.

A good RL friend of mine recorded this a long long time ago, the file is dated as rendered on 9 Feb 2012 so a few days before that I guess.

I uploaded it to YouTube twice and the upload failed both times. Anyway, it’s really good and you should be watching it right now.

Part 1 (20:00)

Part 2 (21:07)

Maybe more like this to come? Who knows.

Today, I reinstalled the server. It was on Fedora but now is on Ubuntu. This is because while trying to install MySQL and minimize memory usage I found that it wasn’t accepting half the configuration options I was giving it. I then tried installing MySQL server from source and from RPMs which didn’t work either, then after trying a load of other things libMySQL completely stopped working and even PHP couldn’t connect to MySQL.

I did like how lightweight Fedora was but it didn’t work properly. Anyway the set up was completely asinine. I actually had the server connecting to my home servers MySQL because I couldn’t run it without it eating all my RAM which broke ffmpeg’s malloc because there wasn’t enough memory to encode the video.

I’m really happy with what I’ve set up now though. MySQL is now configured to run with MyISAM and not InnoDB, this makes it use hardly any RAM at all. I still use Apache for mod_h264 and FLV streaming but with a different multi-processing module to reduce memory usage. Finally, beanstalk and Nitori are also running in unison and this comes to a total of around 175MB RAM usage. This is okay as I have 768MB and there should be enough for HD encodes but I haven’t tested it yet.

The production version of Prismriver Cinema is fully available for you to play around with, provided you have an invite – hehe.

If you’re so inclined to upload videos then you can contact me on Steam as always.

My to-do list for now:

• Add video duration column to MySQL. Make a script that will get the duration from current videos.
• Add option for uploading your own thumbnail, this is simply because ffmpeg isn’t perfect at this.
• Implement the view counter. Not going to go into detail about this so people won’t know how it works.
• Keep working on the new home page, have more content boxes for seperate games?
• Add more stuff at the bottom of user pages, it’s still empty after this long.

I’m thrilled that my vision of a website where I archive my videos and have full control over them is coming along so well.

I’ll be finishing the reuploads tonight with Chaos Theory and then SailedSeven’s 2fort commentary that I never got around to uploading due to YouTube upload failures.

What does this mean? Someone other than me has successfully uploaded a video with no conversion errors.

That’s hard to believe but we did it. Massive props to SailedSeven for having the patience to keep uploading his video.

Edit: Milestone one expressed through the command line output.

Can you actually believe this? I finally completed the first working version of the upload system! It’s true!

I’ve been under a lot of pressure to get this working from three specific people who I won’t name so it’s a massive relief to have something to show.

It works kind of like this, the first list is from the web interface.

1. A logged-in user uploads a video from the web interface along with information about it.
2. The video meta-data such as title, subtitle and music information is escaped and verified.
3. The video MIME-type is checked before being passed on to the job server.
4. The script then passes on the video ID and temporary filename to the job server.

This next list is from the job server.

1. Enters an infinite loop waiting for encoding jobs. Our job server is powered by beanstalkd.
2. When job is retreived, decodes JSON serialised array for ID and filename. Verify file exists.
3. Queries MySQL to retrieve video meta-data and to set the status of the video to encoding.
4. Encodes the video to an FLV file. After encoding is complete: injects the file with metadata.
5. Changes MySQL row to active and in_queue to false. Video is now viewable!

This of course, is the first version.It’s missing tons of other stuff such as thumbnail generation, error checking and HD quality to name a few.

I was thrilled to see it finally working on my production server. I am having issues there with MySQL using way too much RAM than it needs to but I’ll get around to that.

Here’s a picture of the worker bot I wrote for encoding.

#2 – Director

I’ve been playing the Counter-Strike: Source Beta for a while now. Using my home server as a dedicated game server I was also able to try out the replay system.

I had tried it before in Team Fortress 2 and it was nice but I never really got around to using it, TF2 just isn’t my game. CSS is.

After watching a few tutorials I knew enough to make this video.

It was really cool, the way I didn’t need to bother with VirtualDub and force resampling to get that kind of motion blur effect was very convenient.

If you record a POV or SourceTV demo along with a replay you’re pretty much set. That way you can do the old Source Recorder method for rendering the POV demo
if you want the kill feed and scope to appear, and then use the replay to do the smooths on deaths.

I haven’t really been able to integrate them much as it is completely new to me, I’ve never liked smoothing deaths but everyone tells me it’s an essential for CSS movie making.

Okay, that isn’t really as relevant as I thought it would be. The point is that I’m making a new program to make things easier for people.

Director is a program that will allow you to share your replays with friends, download new replays and share cuts for those replays.

A list of features I plan on having in the first public release:

1. Ability to manage replays in all replay enabled Source games.
   This will allow you to see all your replays and cuts by map, amount of kills recorded, players in the server, length, cuts, etc..
2. Ability to easily import and export replays for redistribution.
   Let’s face it. The replay system is great but Valve clearly weren’t thinking of redistributing replays like you can redistribute demos.
   I’ll overcome this by shipping all the data that is required for your replay to play back and have it install itself in the Source game
   the replay was intended to played back in.
3. Ability to download other replays submitted by other Director users into the replay enabled game.
   For example, if you get a nice airshot in TF2 and you want someone to edit it: all you’ll have to do is open Director, find the replay
   and share it. This will upload it to the Director network and instantly be available for anyone to download it.
4. Ability to share cuts on specific replays and upload them to the Director network
   Cuts are cool too. For example, if you upload a round from a CSS match, I’ll be able to download it and make a cut where it follows
   all the action in third-person or something like that and then be able to share it on the uploaded replay as a user-submitted cut.
   This could also be used if you want someone else to do the death smooth from a clip you made because you’re not good at it or whatever.

That’s some of the ideas I’ve had so far, I’m pretty proud of the parser I wrote to convert Valve’s serialised data into JSON and then decode into Lua.

The project will be entirely open source and available at GitHub like all my other projects. Anyway, there isn’t much to show from a few hours work last night.

#3 – Dota 2

I got invited to Dota 2 but I don’t really understand the game at all. I also heard it’s going to be free-to-play. That’s nice of Valve.

The engine looks really nice though, I wouldn’t have thought it was the Source engine if it weren’t for a few things that give it away.

I would have much prefered a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Beta invite. Haha.

#4 – Katawa Shoujo

I’ve found that sitting here in the WordPress administration panel, trying to discuss my feelings about this game is impossible. This will have to do.

PS: Apologies if this was written badly, I’m still tired. Also massive shout out to Joe Kenny for being awesome.

Yesterday I started working on the user page, it looked great but when clicking videos on the side next to the featured video it wouldn’t change the video title and upload date underneath the video.

And now, to describe some of the features here:

• Featured video is set by the user, it can even be a video that you didn’t upload.
• Videos on the right hand side are pulled from your uploaded video list, if you do not have any videos uploaded it will not show the featured video and the videos on the right hand side, it will only show the bottom part.
• Clicking videos on the right hand side will load (and play) that video in the featured video area. If JavaScript is disabled it will take you to the watch page instead.
• There is a MySQL boolean value on the featued video automatically playing when you visit the user page in a similar fashion to YouTube.
• XHTML Valid!

Man, I like jQuery. It’s really cool, I feel bad for only starting to use it and learn basic JavaScript now.